Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Accountability for Failing Doctors and Hospitals

Children in poor areas of DC, Chicago, New York and other urban areas have much lower birth weights than children in the suburbs. It is obvious that public health care doctors and hospitals that serve these poor, black, and immigrant early underachievers are going to require new accountability measures to make sure that birth weight gap is addressed. And if they fail to produce children who meet the new birth weight targets, then we are going to have to shut them down and re-open them as privately-managed companies that will be operated from funds that went previously to the failed government clinics and the lazy doctors who worked there. Maybe then we will finally begin to see birth weights increase. And if not, they certainly couldn't be any less. Could they?

Clinics and hospitals receiving federal funds intended for poor patients will be required to weigh pregnant patients in Months 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 and to report these weights the the State. If patients do not meet the target weights that have been estabished by the State to make sure that all American babies are born at average or above average weight by 2014, then the facilities and doctors who treat and weigh these patients will be placed on "Needs Improvement List" (NIL). After five years on the list, the doctors will be fired and the facility re-opened under private management.

Sure, there will be the bigots of low expectancy expectations who whine about other factors influencing birth weights, but these are the same welfare advocates will use any excuse keep their government handouts coming in while children remain trapped in a failed public health care system. No more excuses, bigots!